


All The Other Kids

by wartransmission



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU where everyone is pretty much fucked up in the brain, Gen, slightly morbid, tw: attempted suicide, tw: murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-10
Updated: 2012-06-10
Packaged: 2017-11-07 11:00:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/430333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wartransmission/pseuds/wartransmission
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’d all occasionally wondered if they were odd before the game. It wasn’t hard to think that way when kids were always around (in Dave and John’s case, anyway), and their sort was the farthest thing from any of the other kids in the neighborhood.</p><p>But this game is theirs to win.</p><p>They are the heroes, the kids who died and became gods, and they will not lose.</p><p>Not now, when they already have each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All The Other Kids

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING: If things like murder, self-harm, and other violent things involving blood and guts squicks you out, please hit the back button. I'm not very graphic with my writing, but still. (At least, I think I'm not.)
> 
> I just needed to let this out of my system after listening to Pumped Up Kicks by Foster The People on repeat, and reading awesome morbid stories.

****

John is nine years old when he first sees a human corpse.

He has just gotten home from school, sock-covered feet padding softly on the almost-sparkling floor as he looks for his dad, and some possible grub that isn’t cake. The lights are off, dad always says that it’s better to conserve energy, but the kitchen lights are on so he heads there instantly with his bag still hanging heavily from his shoulder.

The first thing John notices is that there’s a knife. It’s glinting dangerously under the light, and the hand holding it is familiar, not too large but not small, long fingers and trimmed nails, and he’s not very surprised when he looks at the body it’s attached to. Broad shoulders, straight back, barely muscled arms hiding underneath a white polo shirt with his head bare of his usual fedora. His hair is slicked back as always, and John notes that the grey color is already dusting across black hair. His dad is getting old.

The man standing ( _cowering_ ) in front of him is lean, tall but skinny- although muscled in the smallest ways when John looks at his arms. His back is pressing on the counter, hands all but firm as they grip on the counter’s edge. His voice is bordering on quivering as he says, “Egbert, come on, you know I don’t cheat my mates like that.”

John knows that his dad is smiling that serene smile of his. It’s his voice. Soft, yet firm, commanding in his words as he speaks. “I do know. But we both know that you’re a liar in every way.”

The stranger’s red hair practically lights up under the kitchen light, and it makes his pale skin even more noticeable. He’s sweating, and John starts to wonder if it’s cold. “I’m not lyin’, you know that, I didn’t steal nothing from you.”

“Ah, that grammar of yours. You didn’t steal nothing,” his father says, voice calm even as he edges closer, “you stole everything, isn’t that right? You know how my job works, Robert. I do the boring paperwork- but for you to make me your scapegoat with your errors? Shame on you.”

“I told you, it wasn’t me!” Robert’s panic is clear now, he’s trembling and his legs have locked down on him as he yells, “It wasn’t me, man! It was Joe, always Joe-”

“I’ve already taken care of Joe, remember?” His father states simply. The stranger freezes, green-eyes wide as he stares in wide-eyed horror. “Now it’s your turn.”

“Wait-”

The knife is stabbed into the red-head’s chest before he can say anything else, the blood quickly seeping into his dark blue shirt as the knife is dragged down, lower and lower until it’s made a line of blood down the stranger’s stomach. A gurgling sound escapes him before everything until he collapses, the dark liquid trickling out of his body and onto the white linoleum before being followed by a darker liquid (fresher blood, John thinks idly to himself in remembrance of science class). It reminds him of the cat he’d seen run over by a truck the day before, the body twitching every now and then, before falling completely still. Dead.

“John,” his father calls out and his head snaps up from its gaze on the fallen corpse. His father smiles, exhaustion tugging at the corners of his lips as he steps towards you. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

“It’s fine,” he answers, voice blank of emotion as he reminds himself that ‘it’s the shock, that’s why you’re not freaking out’. “I have homework. Do we have some food in the fridge that isn’t cake?”

His father sighs, the slight dimming of his eyes noticeable to your blue ones as he nods. “I brought home some chicken, luckily for you.” He turns around, the blood on his shirt being hidden from John’s gaze as he heads over to the fridge. His father opens it briefly, taking out a plastic container before handing it to him. He doesn’t bother to say anything about the blood dripping from where his dad had held it.

“Thanks,” John grins at him, before turning around and leaving the room. The incident is forgotten immediately, his mind covering up the morbid memories with fights over cake and blood spurting on TV screens as he plays on his video game console.

Four years later, he wields what he calls a pogo hammer and he wonders why the blood escaping the imps are black, not red, and he knows he’s seen this all before but it’s wrong, it’s all wrong because it has to be a knife and not a hammer, but he leaves it be eventually.

  


\----------

  


Jade’s grandpa brought home a live deer once, and dissected it in front of her. The fascination was immense in her chest, making a curious sort of heat coil in her loins, until she told her grandpa that she didn’t like seeing the deer tortured like it was anymore. She’d said that she preferred it that the meat was taken when the prey was already dead. It was a curious cover for her real reason, but it was good enough to stop her grandpa from taking their food back alive.

She disliked the morbid fascination nagging at the back of her mind when she saw how the thing had tried to make a sound that would have been a scream if it had been human, and the way that it tried to struggle against her grandfather’s butcher knife. If she’d told Rose about it, the other girl would have probably called her loony. She was only five when she’d made that discovery, after all.

Sliced right from the belly, blood dripping from the cut, and organs clear for her to see when her grandfather helps her open the deer up. It’s her first time with a cadaver, and the excitement is obvious that she can feel it tingling under her skin. The heart and liver would be their dinner for that night, and the skin would be used to make a drum, perhaps. Her grandfather never wanted to waste anything he got from his hunts, anyway. He also made sure to store away all of the skulls he collects from his catches, which Jade definitely doesn’t mind. They’re very entertaining to look at with all their nooks and crannies. 

She dislikes the trophies, though. They’re mutations, chimeras, and she prefers it when the corpses that she sees are predictable down to the last bone.

She’s ten when her grandfather dies. Shot by a stray bullet, left bleeding on the wild grass, and Jade has to be the one to take his body in. It’s the perfect chance for a study and she takes it immediately, taking a knife from the kitchen and using it as a makeshift scalpel. She makes certain that it’s clean, that his body is still whole in the end and no parts are missing so that she’ll be able to stuff and piece him together again once she’s done.

Her curiosity is satisfied, she thinks, once she puts him in the basement and he stands proudly, just like he always did when he was still alive. It’s unusual, she realizes from her friends, to talk to her dead grandfather as though he were still capable of thinking, but she doesn’t mind doing it over and over again. The familiarity is comforting, at the least.

She sees herself shooting bullets at Bec after four years pass, him always avoiding it with his cosmic powers or whatever it was that they were called, and a soft voice in her head always whispers to her, “Don’t you miss having those cadavers, dear?”

 

\---------

 

Rose is hiding in the wine cellars, never wasting a look at any of the bottles as she peeks out to see if her mother is around. Avoiding her is the goal, and it must be done efficiently. Yet misfortune follows her when she hears the loud click-clack of her mother’s heels stepping down the stairs as she enters the wine cellar herself. 

She’s barely nine at that point, and she’s smart enough to realize that her mother is holding a knife when she takes a seat on the chair sitting in front of the lone table in their cellar. She holds in a gasp, making sure not to make a sound as she carefully cranes her head to see better through the holes between the bottles. 

She’s making it through nine years of her life, and she’s a prodigy, her mother tells her. She knows that it’s a knife that slicing through her mother’s skin, making bright red liquid drip from her arm until its making soft trickling noises on the wooden table. Rose can barely hide the horror and fascination in her body, making her gape and her eyes widen as she stares at her own mother _hurting_ herself.

The noise she makes is small and unnoticeable when she leaves, footsteps soft as she scurries away and out of the room. Her mother’s back is turned when she leaves but she knows (oh, she knows) that Rose has seen her. It’s far too late to hide.

They tell her that she thinks far too hard, she sees far too much, but somewhere in the back of her mind she knows: it’s not enough. She has to hide. She has to look at other people, has to think of what they are and why they act the way they do because if she doesn’t, she’ll see herself. She’ll see how far gone she is, how there are tiny voids in her mind where her feelings are supposed to be, and she’ll know that she doesn’t care. Things are fine the way they are, and she will keep them that way. 

That’s why she locks herself up in her room night after night, weeks after the incident. Her mom is an alcoholic, she’s known that for years. But why? Escaping from her problems? Self-pity? Enjoyment? And now she was- is cutting herself, if she counts the times that her mother continues to go down to the cellar with a barely hidden knife on her. She tries to figure it out (was it the self-pity again? Self-destructive tendencies? _Boredom?_ ), if only to find out a reason to make her mother stop what she’s doing. She’s tried talking the elder woman out of it, sat her down with a purposeful grace around her, but her mother just smiled, laughed, and told her “what a good daughter you are, caring for your mother like that. I love you, sweetie.” She went off after that, another half-empty bottle swinging precariously from her dainty hands.

She won’t become like her, she promises to herself. She won’t be her mother, no matter how much nature tells her that she will be.

Five years later finds her fighting ogres and other mutated monsters, needles killing ruthlessly with sharp ends boring holes into their soulless eyes and making them bleed black liquid. She rips them apart without much mind, skirt fluttering behind her as her needles find other targets. They’re the ones to die, not her, and it’s her truth. She would not become weak like her mother had, and she would not die here.

That same year she finds herself offering to do a mission that is absolutely suicidal in all aspects, and she does not find words to explain herself. It’s a choice that she makes that goes against Dave’s own wishes, and she wants it.

She doesn’t know if this makes her weak, or if she’s recently acquired the grandest level of stupidity called “bravery.”  

 

\------------

  


There’s another corpse in the living room, Dave thinks, and it’s a girl. They’ve always been boys before.

He’s eight when he sees the sixth (or was it tenth?) corpse staining blood all over their carpet. Well, not exactly; the others he’d found in differing places. Two were in the kitchen, one in the bathroom, one in his brother’s room, and the others in the living room. Some were taken to the roof at times, but Dave’s not certain how many they are.

His brother is standing over the body, blood all over his white shirt as he tugs the sword out from the woman’s chest to place it into its place by his belt. He doesn’t bother to smile, just looks at Dave with his lips in a firm line and amusement tugging at the edge of his lips as he motions for his little brother to come closer. He does so without much hesitation, red eyes hiding beneath dark lenses as his brother heaves him up until he’s sitting on his arm and he’s held close to his elder brother’s chest. He doesn’t mind the blood seeping into his own white shirt as his brother grips tightly onto him. It’s probably not much effort on his part to carry Dave like this. “What are you doing up so late at night, kid?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” he mumbles, voice soft as he looks down at the corpse then at his brother’s face. “Why is it a girl this time?”

“We need some variation in our lives. That, and she steals little kids and takes them home, rapes them, and kills them. Don’t you think she deserves this?”

Dave pauses, small hands clutching onto his brother’s chest as he stares down at the still bleeding corpse. She was obviously stabbed in the chest, but other than that, there was nothing. She was dead in an instant, stabbed straight to the heart. It didn’t seem fair. “No.”

“No?” His brother asks, the eyebrow raise obvious even with his own shades.

“She needs to die slower,” he remarks, voice light as he looks up at his brother again. There’s a small pause after that answer, then his brother laughs. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing, nothing,” his brother chuckles, before he turns around and takes Dave to the bathroom. “You’re just really smart, for a kid.”

He smiles brightly at that. Compliments are always rare coming from his brother. “Really?”

His brother smiles. “Really.” He presses a gentle kiss to Dave’s forehead and it’s gross, but he doesn’t say it when his brother pulls away. He just smiles, laughs, and hides the wince itching to reveal itself. He wants to carve his name into his brother’s skin, let him know that he is Dave’s, but he’ll never be able to do that. His brother is still stronger than him.

His expression is blank when he sees his brother’s corpse five years later, the urge he’d always had for years to carve his name into his brother’s skin gone. It’s not fair. If anyone could kill his brother, it’s supposed to be him. Not a fucked up mutation of a dog that’s gone mad.

He swears to himself then that he’ll kill the bastard that had killed his brother and he’d carve the name he’d shared with his brother on him, slowly etching each large letter on the monster’s skin as a reminder of what he’d done.

He won’t forget.

 

\-----------------------

 

The days after Sburb finds them killing mindlessly, weapons wielded, blood spilled without much thought as they behead and stab and tear through black flesh.

They’d all occasionally wondered if they were odd before the game. It wasn’t hard to think that way when kids were always around (in Dave and John’s case, anyway), and their sort was the farthest thing from any of the other kids in the neighborhood. Dave saw families when he went home after class and thought idly if anyone ever thought of marking their kin as a way of claiming them, John went mindlessly through his life at the neighborhood and in school with blurry memories of blood and guts spilling over clean floors (though he always pushed those memories away because they were weird), Jade talked to Dave and Rose and John and always wanted to ask if they knew what it felt like to want to study something from the inside out in the literal manner (but she kept it to herself once Dave told her how weird it was, even though she knew he was joking), and Rose just _knew_ she was all kinds of weird- because what kind of daughter would let her mother do such a stupid thing yet find it as a weakness of her own?

But this game is theirs to win.

They are the heroes, the kids who died and became gods, and they will not lose.

Not now, when they already have each other.


End file.
